I'm spending a lot of time at the moment finding literature on various areas of physics and the amount of ******** pay walls I come up against is ****ing stupid. It also means scientists from poor countries can not get access to them without forking a massive bill.

Currently it's only specifically open source journals such as IOP and other specifically freely available. But that could be about to change.

"All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas."

Can you imagine UK Tories doing this? Why would anyone set up a journal or do science if the work was accessible free of charge or if there was in fact no profit motive? Are you crazy?

(Original post by ChaoticButterfly)
"All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas."

I wonder what they mean by "published in the EU" though. Does that mean the journal has to be based in the EU or the researchers (all or some of them?) based in the EU, or the funding source(s) based in the EU?

I'm spending a lot of time at the moment finding literature on various areas of physics and the amount of ******** pay walls I come up against is ****ing stupid. It also means scientists from poor countries can not get access to them without forking a massive bill.

Currently it's only specifically open source journals such as IOP and other specifically freely available. But that could be about to change.

"All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas."

Can you imagine UK Tories doing this? Why would anyone set up a journal or do science if the work was accessible free of charge or if there was in fact no profit motive? Are you crazy?

Information wants to be free!

Spoiler:

Show

EPSRC (UK council) funded research that is published is already required to be open access - either by paying extra to the journal in question or by being made available on the universities' library repository.

(Original post by Jebedee)
It's easy to be generous with other people's things, even intellectual property.

Is this a bad time to point out that the academic community is very strongly behind this, and has been for years?

(Original post by Nichrome)
EPSRC (UK council) funded research that is published is already required to be open access - either by paying extra to the journal in question or by being made available on the universities' library repository.

I'm spending a lot of time at the moment finding literature on various areas of physics and the amount of ******** pay walls I come up against is ****ing stupid. It also means scientists from poor countries can not get access to them without forking a massive bill.

Currently it's only specifically open source journals such as IOP and other specifically freely available. But that could be about to change.

"All publicly funded scientific papers published in Europe could be made free to access by 2020, under a “life-changing” reform ordered by the European Union’s science chief, Carlos Moedas."

Can you imagine UK Tories doing this? Why would anyone set up a journal or do science if the work was accessible free of charge or if there was in fact no profit motive? Are you crazy?

Information wants to be free!

Spoiler:

Show

It's wonderful news, let's hope this is the beginning of the end for Elsevier et al.

Curious, by "Europe" did you mean the the EU or just European countries?

I assume the EU government.

As humans we don't need the EU to do this kind of thing. But the "centrist" "mainstream" brexit cause seems to me to be totally hostile to this kind of "communism". Brexit is more concerned with immigration than it is with how wealth and information should be distributed in the modern era.

How does this work? Checking peoples browsers so that they can see if they live in Europe? Realistically this will mean that all of these will be available to the whole world. Dont get me wrong im completely for this and support the EU its just that this will mean that this research will be available to anyone in the world who can get a VPN which is effectively everyone.

(Original post by Bernie2016)
How does this work? Checking peoples browsers so that they can see if they live in Europe? Realistically this will mean that all of these will be available to the whole world. Dont get me wrong im completely for this and support the EU its just that this will mean that this research will be available to anyone in the world who can get a VPN which is effectively everyone.

It's by the location of the publishers, not the viewers. Essentially, if you're publishing through an EU organisation, you have to release it publicly.

(Original post by Bernie2016)
How does this work? Checking peoples browsers so that they can see if they live in Europe? Realistically this will mean that all of these will be available to the whole world. Dont get me wrong im completely for this and support the EU its just that this will mean that this research will be available to anyone in the world who can get a VPN which is effectively everyone.

Good. Like why on Earth is that a bad thing? I can't get my head around it. That is intrinsically good as far as I can see.

You can't stop progress.

That is only a bad thing if you are an awful human.

"Oh no! This massive network we have made than can duplicate information in what tends to infinity will will be distributed to every human who has access to this network. No what we really need is to create artificial scarcity in order to ensure a large section of humanity lives in the dark ages for perpetuity."

It's like if we invented a machine that could be used to duplicate food with next to no effort but we made laws to prohibit it on "piracy" grounds so a bunch of selfish people can profit. Make sure hunger continues so some people can get rich.